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Are Facebook profiles costing you fans?

By now most people will have adopted Facebook’s new profile format.
Unfortunately one of these recent changes showcases a pretty big flaw in
Facebook’s connectivity, and unhappily for the social networking giant,
it’s one that impacts businesses directly.

By now most users will be aware of which changes they will need to make
(if any) to optimise the new profile, but there are now a few sections
which are unfortunately beyond your control, chiefly the way your
‘Employer Information’ is displayed.

If you have updated to a new profile layout, then every profile you view will be displayed in this way.

Yes, I’m vain enough to have set up one of those huge pictures on
my profile. Ignore my swarthy good looks and the ridiculous content for a moment though and instead direct your eyes towards the Information bar.

Seems fine, that’s the right University, I live in London, and I’m older than I like to admit.

The Econsultancy that Facebook links to is a randomly generated filler page, based only on the information I have entered (In other words, If I decide to change my employer to ‘Darth Vader’ then a randomly generated ‘Darth Vader’ page will appear here).

On the individual level this isn’t a huge problem, but it’s worth considering the impact this can have on larger businesses and brands in general.

If you are a multinational with 100,000 employees listing you on Facebook, then there will be 100,000 alternatives to your official Company page, pages which the creators could also possibly claim as their own, which leaves scope for brand hijacking.

In addition, people have the ability to ‘Like’ this randomly generated page.

I occasionally get friend requests from people who’ve tracked me down via Google or through Twitter and LinkedIn, and although my Facebook is largely personal information rather than anything work related I’m happy to add them in the interest of general networking.

Unfortunately a few have ‘Liked’ this random page by mistake.

These are likely to be people who have viewed my profile because they are interested in Econsultancy.

Now they are friends with an empty page that doesn’t provide them with any information, rather than our actual page which provides regular updates (and yes, I am going to ask you to follow us on Facebook). Worse, it’s also impossible for me to see who the new page’s ‘Fans’ are and inform them of the mistake.

Facebook has obviously instituted this method of listing companies to avoid confusion. If you work for a ‘Middle School’ or ‘National Bank’ then there is obviously room for serious mistakes to occur were Facebook simply to guess which ‘Middle School’ you actually worked for: One in Delaware, or one in Krakow?

A hijacked brand or a massive boost to a competitor’s page is a worst case scenario of course, but as marketers work hard to gain new fans and make connections, it’s still an annoyance that potential customers are being redirected to the incorrect destination.

Currently this can be fixed: Simply delete your employer and re-add them to select the correct company here (although that said, Facebook still doesn’t seem to want to locate the real Econsultancy page for me).

But you can’t expect every employee to have the time or inclination to do this even if you have pointed it out and requested that your staff update.

Facebook shouldn’t expect you to, especially as the problem isn’t made clear, but instead requiring users to implement some unreliable editing that most people won’t uncover until they move to a new company.

Facebook’s business is largely built on its ability to provide businesses with deep, granular information about users and the functionality to target adds with pinpoint accuracy.

Much of this it does very well, but this simple oversight represents a major flaw in Facebook’s accuracy and the credibility of the social graph that could seriously affect businesses.

Despite its obvious potential, mobile has arguably been overhyped for years. So it’s not exactly surprising that many businesses have held back on their investment in mobile.

But for retailers, both online and offline, that are still skeptical, 2011 may be a good year to take the plunge. That’s because according to a survey conducted by SapientNitro, consumer habits finally caught up in a big way with expectations and hype last year.

Marketers have been paying celebrities to endorse their products and services for decades, so it’s no surprise that there’s a booming market for celebrity endorsements via their social media profiles.

With the help of companies like Ad.ly, celebrities and ‘influencers’ are reportedly earning thousands upon thousands of dollars for a single tweet or Facebook status update.

In the United States, marketers paying high-profile individuals to tweet and blog about their products worried the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so much that it developed guidelines around the practice.

There are anticipated technologies that, despite capturing the imagination of technophiles, analysts and journalists, seem to just never arrive as soon as one expects or hope.

Mobile commerce and mobile wallets are good examples. Year after year, the vision and ambition are strong but the execution and usage is weak. However, there are a number of reasons to expect that 2011 is the year that a tipping point in the use of mobile phones as the ultimate shopping enabler becomes reality.

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.